film studies at the university of colorado boulder.
Historical and material approaches to the reuse, reformation and reconstitution of existing sources from Cubism to PostModernism. Originality, appropriation, authorship, intellectual property, found footage, home movies, readymades, remixes, copyleft and free culture.

Friday, October 24, 2008

This week we studied the amazing amusing films of American artist Joseph Cornell, locating them at the intersection of his deep involvement with collage and his love for the cinema. "ROSE HOBART" (1936)is his infamous 16mm film-collage portrait of the actress Rose Hobart made from the 1931 jungle drama "East of Borneo" in which theartist esssentially excises from the film all that is not the object of his devotion. Perhaps in a similar tradition (albeit with a decidely dissimilar economy) the new video-portrait "ZIDANE" by artists Douglas Gordon and Philip Parreno opened today at New York City's Anthology Film Archives...

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Group project where each person got a few seconds/feet of a found film about lasers and had their crazy way with it, incorporating various handmade techniques* in working directly on the footage-- then we spliced it back together in order more or less, like this:*scratching, spray painting, chemicals, magazine transfers, rub-on letters, hole-punching, and even photograms!! (also see posts under 'March' for similar examples...)

Thursday, October 2, 2008

THE DOCTOR'S DREAM, not the title of the found film as originally made for television... the editing device was to count the number of shots and start the film off with numerically middle shot and then, after that, the shot that had preceded it, and the shot that had followed it, and keep fanning further and further out until you saw the first shot of the film followed by the last shot, which was of the painting the movie is based on... It's called 'The Doctor;' it's in the Tate Gallery in London... and it has an interesting subliminal image appropriate to my discovery, via this reconstruction, of the real story of the film. A powerful sexual event was hidden within its banality. Maybe without intention, but it's what was gripping in the movie, if ever the movie was gripping. And now in the painting, seen from a little distance, the doctor contemplates the sleeping girl with, you don't have to agree with me, his curled fist doubling as a penis entering his mouth (I'm sad to find myself so constrained in my speech)... Maybe this is the traditional method of smuggling forbidden information, hot stuff, through customs from unadmitting mind to unadmitting mind. --K. J.